A comedy/drama set in a village and centered on a battle
of the sexes, where women threaten to withhold sexual
favors if their men refuse to fetch water from a remote
well.

The Source (French: La Source des femmes) is a 2011
French drama-comedy film directed by Radu Mihăileanu,
starring Leïla Bekhti and Hafsia Herzi. It premiered In
Competition at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.

Set in a remote village in North Africa, the story does
focus on women who go on a sex strike against having to
fetch water from a distant well.

The film was produced by France''s Elzevir Films and Oï
Oï Oï Productions, in co-production with France 3 Cinéma
and EuropaCorp. Other than the 64% French investment,
Belgian companies contributed 14%, Italian 12% and
Moroccan 10%. It was pre-bought by Canal+ and CinéCinéma
and received support from Eurimages. The total budget
was 7.99 million euro.

User Reviews
Mihaileanu gets better and better
25 October 2012 | by robert-temple-1 (United Kingdom)
Every time I see one of Radu Mihaileanu''s amazing films
I think he cannot make a better one than that, and then
he does. This is probably the best yet. The story is set
in an anonymous North African location, but the film was
shot in a wild and remote village in Morocco somewhere
in the vicinity of Marrakesh. As usual, many of the
supporting actors seem to be indigenous local
inhabitants. The film was shot in Arabic, but it seems
that in France the dialogue was dubbed into French,
whereas the English language DVD has the original Arabic
dialogue with English subtitles, which is thus more
authentic. The lead actress, of magical beauty and
talent, is Leila Bekhti. She is of Algerian descent but
was born in France. The actress who plays her sister
Loubna/Esmeralda, Hafsia Herzi, was also born in France
and is of mixed Tunisian and Algerian descent. Bekhti''s
vicious and unbalanced mother-in-law is played by Hiam
Abbass, an Israeli Arab who has acted in 65 films.
Mihaileanu has been very clever to find these amazing
actresses, who are all completely convincing as locals
who inhabit the small village where the story is set.
This is a film about women who rebel against the
oppressive customs of their lazy, and often brutal,
husbands, who justify their indolence and oppression of
their wives by ''tradition'', or sometimes by unconvincing
references to their religion. For hundreds, or perhaps
thousands, of years, the women of the village have
brought the village''s water in buckets from the spring
(''source'' in French, hence the title). The spring is
high up the mountain slope behind the village, and the
pathway is very rough and difficult. Many of the women
have had miscarriages because they slipped and fell
carrying the buckets of water while they were pregnant.
We see an instance of this near the beginning of the
film. While the women exhaust themselves and lose their
babies by these exertions, the idle husbands sit on a
small terrace sipping mint tea all day long because they
have no jobs. It has never occurred to any of them to
fetch the water or assist his wife. They just sit there,
lazy slobs that they are. And if a baby dies, so what.
The situation becomes intolerable to her, so Leila
Bekhti rebels, supported by the aged widow called Vieux
Fusil (Mrs. Rifle in the subtitles), magnificently
portrayed by the actress Biyouna, who is a true native
Algerian. Bekhti persuades other women in the village to
go on ''love strike'' by denying their rampant husbands
their nightly sex. Many of the women get beaten, and
some get raped when the husbands become furious and
violent. Bekhti is secretly supported by her own
husband, who genuinely loves her, and he sneaks out at
night to carry some buckets of water down from the
spring himself, the only man in the village who ever
does so. He does this on the quiet because he is afraid
the other men might attack him violently if they knew
that he had done ''women''s work''. One gets a very good
idea why nothing ever happens in North Africa by way of
business development, since there appears to be no
initiative amongst the men, who are mostly seen to be
arrogant, spoiled, pompous, querulous, and many of them
are very violent indeed, almost psychopathically so. An
Imam lectures the women that it says in the Koran that a
man should beat his wife if she is disobedient. However,
Bekhti, who is the only woman in the village who can
read, quotes to the old Imam rival suras from the Koran
and a Hadith (''Sayings of the Prophet'') text which crush
his arguments, so that he becomes dejected and ceases to
oppose them. Many of the men of the village organise a
scheme to renounce their wives and get new, obedient and
excessively religious wives to come in and take their
place. But the Imam ends his support for this scheme
after Bekhti defeats him in her theological arguments.
One of the most strenuous opponents of the women is
Nissam, the son of Biyuona. She fearlessly berates him,
tells him he is a good for nothing, and eventually
throws him out of the house. This film tackles head-on
the problems of the oppression of women and religious
fanaticism in the Muslim world in North Africa. One of
the remarkable aspects of the film is that the women
communicate their stories and grievances by improvising
songs rather than by speaking, which seems to be a local
custom. They repeatedly shame their men by out-singing
them. This is an extremely profound and very deep
examination of life in a remote ethnic community, and a
story of great courage. The film is both extremely
emotional and deeply disturbing. It is never possible to
watch a Mihaileanu film without being both shaken and
stirred. It is another triumph for that brilliant
director, a Paris resident of Romanian origin, who is
certainly one of the finest film directors working in
Europe today.